“‘You’re only as good as your last tweet…’: Academic Self-Branding and Knowledge Dissemination”

This study is part of an ongoing investigation into what we consider to be a unique form of knowledge dissemination differentiating academics’ online identity construction from everyone else who has an online public profile (Fitzpatrick, 2015). The idea of crafting the perception of who scholars are through personal branding, although relatively new in the academic workplace, has gained momentum during the past decade due to the rapidly changing world of work and the proliferation of online social media which have blurred the boundaries between work and personal lives (Duffy et al, 2017).With the Web becoming our workplace, where involvement in networking practices and the construction of a social presence are no longer a choice, scholars are now seriously reflecting on the importance of defining personal branding tools for the dual purpose of individual advancement and knowledge dissemination. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the overlapping processes of social construction of academic identity and disciplinary knowledge dissemination (Hyland, 2012; 2015). By exploring scholarly knowledge sharing practices of sites, such as Academia.edu, which foreground the entrepreneurial mission of “accelerating the world’s research” (Price, 2013: 13) the specific focus of the study is to assess the impact that these practices may have on how language is devised and packaged by academics in order to facilitate knowledge dissemination. Our corpus comprises 5,445 online academic profiles of Humanities scholars drawn from the Academia.edu platform which include multimodal instantiations of both knowledge dissemination and self-branding resources. The resulting hybrid genre (Eggins and Martin, 1997; Bhatia, 2000; Swales, 2004) seems to highlight new forms of academic social presence construed by and through ad hoc multimodal devices which, we posit, will eventually change the perception of the academic world in line with the fast communicative immediacy of the new media.